Lecturer in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths London
June 1, 2021
“If the truth is turned against the colonised”: Exhaustive Verbalisation and the Impossibility of Truth-telling
As Foucault states in The Confession of the Flesh, pastoral power is characterised by the government of men through the manifestation of their individual truth in the form of an exhaustive verbalisation. In this presentation I argue that Foucault’s analyses on confession with Fanon’s reflections about the impossibility for the colonised subject of telling the truth – and being considered a truthful subject. In fact, as Fanon argues, objectivity and truth are always turned against the colonised (Fanon, 2008). Building on
that, I investigate how confession, exhaustive verbalisation and discourse of truth are played out in the field of refugee governance and, in particular, during the asylum procedure. I suggest that in the asylum process, confession and exhaust re-verbalisation are disjoined from asylum seekers’ truth and truth-telling: truth is at the same time external to them (on the state’s side) and turned against them. In fact, the injunction for the asylum seekers to speak and narrate their lives in detail takes place within an economy of epistemic violence in which their stories and subjectivities as well as the very possibility of truth-telling are erased (Beneduce, 2012): the asylum seeker is in fact deemed to be a deceitful subject. In the final part, I will discuss how exhaustive verbalisation, confessional practices and discourse of truth are unfolded in the asylum regime and I will explore continuities between the colonial context that Fanon speaks about and the present.
Martina Tazzioli is Lecturer in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths. She is the author of The Making of Migration: the biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (2020), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016). She is co-editor of Foucault and the History of our Present (2015) and Foucault and the Making of Subjects (2016). Martina is on the editorial board of journal Radical Philosophy. Her new book project is entitled “Border abolitionism. Migration containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue” and she is co-authoring a book with Will Davies, Sahil Dutta, and Nick Taylor about the political-economic transformations triggered by COVID-19 in the UK.